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As The Future Melts AwayI've always been a sucker for a good time lapse. This one strikes me as a time lapse within a time lapse. It's half a day, compressed into less than 5 minutes, with people flitting around like moths, posing for pictures with an ice sculpture of the future. Only the time lapse eyes of the camera can see what's happening. And by the end the passers by probably can't even tell what the message might have been. But the art is a piece of time lapse too. A century or a millennium compressed into a day of melting. Even that

The Ecuadorian LibraryBruce Sterling has posted a great, almost purple rant entitled The Ecuadorian Library, on Manning, Assange, Snowden, and the future of the surveillance/leak game that's only now just beginning to be played with modern equipment. The information wants to be free, but the governments of the world will crush your sniveling, naked meatspace body in a cold, hard cell afterward. And yet miraculously there's more to come. Maybe lots, lots more.

Using Metadata to find Paul RevereFrom the all-too-rare genre of mathematical-political satire: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere. Highlighting for the uninitiated just how much actual information is really contained in even a wee sliver of the so-called metadata we smear all over the digital universe in our wake. Applied to the Founding Fathers.

Refining Steel Without GHG EmissionsRefining metal ores is one of those things that's really, really hard to do without emitting a huge amount of greenhouse gasses. The energy sources behind our material economies are not as easily substitutable with renewables, because what they often require is extreme heat, and sometimes the carbon itself (in the case of steelmaking and concrete). Researchers at MIT are looking at a way of directly refining molten iron oxide directly into pure iron electrolytically that results in very pure iron, and virtually no emissions, and it might work for other oxide refining processes as well.

Global GHG Sankey DiagramAn interesting Sankey representation of global GHG emissions, from Ecofys, updated with data from... 2010. Yowza. Would be good if we could get much more timely reporting of this stuff.

Random Quote

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Links for the week of May 12th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.

Thorn Cycles Sterling – If I were going to get a suspension mountain bike, clearly this would be the one… since you can also use it to criss-cross the Andes loaded down with a week's worth of food and camping gear!

MIT OpenCourseWare HST.508 Genomics and Computational Biology – Freely available audio and slides from George Church's computational biology course at Harvard/MIT. I wish there was some homework from Durbin et al. to go with it, and it would be great if it were less than 8 years old. Also, without the video of the lecture, it's just barely possible to stay fully engaged. I'm surprised how much easier it is when you've got an image of the person to watch.

Another Kind Of Atheism | The New Republic – Godlessness it true, but is it good? I guess I feel like if it's true, we just have to deal with it, and maybe the goodness/evilness of it becomes moot. I mean, quantum mechanics is true… and we don't seem to feel compelled to assign it a moral character. There are a lot of ways to deal with a lack of god. Despair is one, but that doesn't sound like a good option to me. The complementary position is also interesting to consider: god is false, but does that make god necessarily evil? I don't think so. But given the option, some people prefer a difficult truth to an easy lie.